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The question we most need addressed is not what epistemic modals mean, but what to do with other people's.

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"The book goes on to propose a particular version of a philosophy of science position known as structural realism, according to which scientific theories neither track objective reality in a straightforward sense (the so-called realist position), nor do they simply provide us with theoretical conceptions that “work” but whose closeness to truth cannot be assessed (the so-called anti-realist position). Rather, structural realism posits that when scientists abandon one theory for another one (say, Newtonian mechanics in favor of General Relativity) what is retained in the new theory from the old one is a set of mathematical relationships (describing the underlying “structure” of reality)."

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"Structural realism is considered by many realists and antirealists alike as the most defensible form of scientific realism. There are now many forms of structural realism and an extensive literature about them. There are interesting connections with debates in metaphysics, philosophy of physics and philosophy of mathematics. This entry is intended to be a comprehensive survey of the field."

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"The point here is a fundamental one. The covering law model depends on a metaphysics that gives primacy to laws of nature. The framework of critical realism and its cousins depends on a view of the world as consisting of things and processes with real causal powers. This intellectual framework is applicable to the social world as well as to the natural world. And it provides a strong intellectual basis for postulating and investigating social causal mechanisms. Any conception of causal powers requires that we have an idea of the nature of the substrate of causation in various areas. And the social metaphysics of actor-centered sociology provide a strong candidate for such a framework in the case of social causation."

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"Seventy years after Hempel's classic article, the covering law theory is now generally regarded as a fundamentally wrong-headed way of thinking about historical (and social) explanation. Logical positivism is not a convenient lens through which to examine the social and historical sciences. There is too much contingency in the social world. Rather than being the result of law-governed processes, social outcomes proceed from the contingent and historically variable features of the actors who make them. So the attention of many people interested in specifying the nature of historical and social explanation has focused on social mechanisms constituted and driven by common features of agency."

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"Reproducibility is supposedly a basic tenet of science, but a number of fields have raised concerns that modern publishing pressures inhibit replication of experiments. In a well-known 2005 PLoS Medicine essay, epidemiologist John Ioannidis, now at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, argued that in biomedicine, many if not most published research claims are false. He outlined a number of factors—including small sample sizes, small effect sizes, and “flexibility” in the research process—that contribute to a high rate of false positives. One reason those false positives aren't caught is because of a lack of emphasis on replication studies, which is “standard across fields of science,” says Columbia University statistician Victoria Stodden, who studies reproducibility and openness in computational science. "

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"This might seem like a worthy aspiration. Many social scientists contend that science has a method, and if you want to be scientific, you should adopt it. The method requires you to devise a theoretical model, deduce a testable hypothesis from the model and then test the hypothesis against the world. If the hypothesis is confirmed, the theoretical model holds; if the hypothesis is not confirmed, the theoretical model does not hold. If your discipline does not operate by this method — known as hypothetico-deductivism — then in the minds of many, it’s not scientific."

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A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.

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"This article argues for the following: 1. Information is a thing to be handled and controlled; knowledge is not. 2. Knowledge can be managed only indirectly, through the management of information. 3. Personal knowledge management (PKM) is, therefore, best regarded as a subset of personal information management (PIM) — but a very useful subset addressing important issues that otherwise might be overlooked."

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"Many people don't recognise that the commons is not just a thing – a physical element of nature or a resource like the Internet – but a distinct metaphysics and epistemology that challenges some deeply rooted premises of contemporary politics and policy. James Quilligan probes this territory with a thoughtful piece in the latest issue of Kosmos magazine. In particular, he explores the “social nature of property”and how its individual, atomistic nature in liberal political philosophy is responsible for “its catastrophic impact on the commons.”"

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"To start: I've generally found the strictures of "microfoundations" and "agent-based explanations" as representing ontological constraints on sociological explanations rather than guides for empirical research. The constraints require, essentially, that all our explanations of social processes and causal connections need to be compatible with providing plausible micro-level accounts of how they work."

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"The concept of microfoundations is relevant to each of these domains. A microfoundation is:

a specification of the ways in which the properties and structure of a higher-level entity are produced by the activities and properties of lower-level entities.

In the case of the social sciences, this amounts to:

a specification of the ways that properties, structural features, and causal powers of a social entity are produced and reproduced by the actions and dispositions of socially situated individuals."

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GARY GUTTING

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"My feeling (derived largely from observations on climate change and creationism, which raise similar questions) is that we can distinguish numerous different belief states that go along with birtherist answers to opinion poll questions."

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